May 29, 2010

No Coffee? No Cigarettes? No Entry!

In our first year at University, we lived in a townhouse-style complex for students. During the first week, everyone gets along and tries to make nice, and then soon after, culling the herd quickly begins. Even though we filled out lengthy personality questionnaires in an attempt to place us with “similarly-minded” people, instead, they succeeded in placing the 6 most opposite girls to live together in a house. Through the chaos, back-stabbing, anger and tears, there was one thing that we remained united on, and that was the total creepiness of a guy that frequented our place.

At first, he would just come over to ‘hang-out’, which he then rapidly started growing roots directly from his ass and into our couch. None of us liked him; there was something not-quite-right about him. Even when we all went to bed, he remained; having ignored all the not-so-subtle hints about him getting the hell out of our house. We were never brave enough to just come out and say it either. Then, he progressed to staying at our place at all hours, helping himself to our coffee, and smoking all of our cigarettes.

So, OK, now he seemed like a typical mooch, right? Well, not exactly. After about 2 long months of this, the next stage of his comfort level kicked in. He would come in to our house without knocking, give a quick wave to whoever was in the common area, “Hey!” And then go straight upstairs for about 10 minutes. We thought that was weird enough in itself, but it took us about 3 or 4 times of this occurrence to finally figure out what he was doing... He was coming over to our place JUST TO TAKE A SHIT and then (depending on whether or not he had class), he would take off right after, leaving nothing behind but a lingering stench and streak marks in our toilet. What a fucking weirdo!

Since bodily functions are always a sensitive topic for most people, especially us North Americans, we decided to focus on the coffee and cigarette factor. The guys’ house next door also had a problem with this guy, but men are much more forward about these situations; they told him to get the fuck out, and then chased him down the street with a broken beer bottle! In true feminine form, instead of confronting him, we posted a note on our front door that said, “No Coffee? No Cigarettes? No Entry!”

Well, of course, the first time he came to the door and read the sign, he went totally mad! It was kind of terrifying. He was yelling incoherently and occasionally we heard phrases like, “I’m too stressed to deal with this!” and “My mom is on strike, you know!” (She was a teacher, and the strike only lasted 3 weeks; we weren’t talking about the fucking Miners’ Strike of ’84 or anything.) But he mostly directed his insane ranting in the direction of his ACTUAL home, and he stormed away. He was probably busting to take a crap and couldn’t stick around to argue with us.